“I was a tenant for a good many years of the insurance company that owns the building, and when it came to rebuild, it had the architect fit this floor for me just as I wished it. So I put our law-offices in front and arranged my other rooms along the side street. Would you like to see them?” Peter asked this last question very obviously of Leonore.
“Very much.”
So they passed through the other door, to a little square hall, lighted by a skylight, with a stairway going up to the roof.
“I took the upper floor, so as to get good air and the view of the city and the bay, which is very fine,” Peter said. “And I have a staircase to the roof, so that in good weather I can go up there.”
“I wondered what the great firm was doing up ten stories,” said Watts.
“Ogden and Rivington have been very good in yielding to my idiosyncracies. This is my mealing closet.”
It was a room nine feet square, panelled, ceiled and floored in mahogany, and the table and six chairs were made of the same material.
“So this is what the papers call the ‘Stirling political incubator?’ It doesn’t look like a place for hatching dark plots,” said Watts.
“Sometimes I have a little dinner here. Never more than six, however, for it’s too small.”
“I say, Dot, doesn’t this have a jolly cosy feeling? Couldn’t one sit here blowy nights, with the candles lit, eating nuts and telling stories? It makes me think of the expression, ‘snug as a bug.’”